One of the recent developments in beekeeping is “box theft”. Most professionals in the pollination business have hundreds of hives in remote locations – because commercial orchards are huge tracts of land and anyway, the whole point of hive location is to keep the bee-ways from intersecting with people movement. Bee commuters and human commuters don’t play well together. Meanwhile, bees are dying and colonies are scarce and ever more valuable. Stealing them is easy, establishing ownership of a particular box of bees is hard. There are complex solutions like dye and DNA typing, but most people brand their woodenware. It’s fast, permanent, and doesn’t bother the inhabitants. I have two hives on an island and am not feeling too threatened, but I do have a brand.
My grandfather, Louis Harrison Barnard, had a dairy farm. The barns burned (twice) and there isn’t much left except some photos and a few items that weren’t flammable. The brand is about three feet long. The handle is a smooth steel rod that has been fashioned into a loop at the top. The business end is attached to a rough rectangle about 8″ long and letters (reversed as type) have been welded to the face. This isn’t the sort of implement that was used on livestock - I imagine it was burned into the wooden milk cartons and wagon stakes and a lot of other things that went up in the fire.
Last night I made chicken on the barbeque and set the iron in the coals. Then I hauled all my new woodenware out to a gravel area and went to town.
Tags: beekeeping, bees, garden, spring